


the name of the fanfic

by angharabbit



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canada AU, Canada Day Fic, Canadian Slang, F/M, It’s all a bit silly, Kylo being a hoser, Modern AU, Safe For Work, bit fluffy, i know i was surprised too, mild obsession with No Frills, no beloved childhood literature was hurt or besmirched in the making of this fic, roommate au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-31 14:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19428178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angharabbit/pseuds/angharabbit
Summary: Canada Day Celebration Fic!Kylo moves into a summer sublet with new roommate Rey, where he discovers the whole damn country is mildly obsessed with names and No Name.





	1. the first chapter

“Leia, did Han set this up as a prank? A fuck you? A punishment?” Kylo hissed into the phone, doing his eighth round of the tiny two bed apartment’s living area.

When his cab had pulled up to the higher end working class Victorian red brick on Bold Street, Hamilton, he’d been satisfied. Then, as the yellow car pulled away and left him on the heaved and cracked 50’s sidewalk, he noticed the cheap wooden stairs wrapping around the building. It was subdivided into he counted three separate units.

The generic silver key he’d been left in the mailbox labelled “Main” fit the second story unit. It smelled of fresh paint and old plaster inside, pots of mint lining the edges of the fire escape. Someone already lived here.

“You told him you didn’t want to spend a fortune on a sublet since you were only going to be in town for the summer, and a volunteer he met at the Heritage Warplane Museum last week was looking for a sublet for her roommate.”

“I didn’t want a roommate, Leia, I’m here to work.”

“Han said she’s rarely there, Kylo. She works full time nights, and is at the airport or the museum in her free time logging flight hours.”

“So this girl be here all day disturbing me while I’m trying to work in this hovel?” he spat into his phone.

“Actually,” came a calm voice behind him, “I’ll be sleeping, so how about you be quiet in my hovel or leave?”

Kylo hung up on his mother, eyes aflame. He was prepared to find the girl as lacking as her home, neglected and cheaply refurbished, perhaps with an odd smell.

He failed.

His new roommate was pretty, oh so pretty. She stood, fists balled and delineating her hips under the oversized yellow T-shirt. It said ‘hauler’ in plain, lower-case helvetica. What exactly did the woman haul?

It was beside the point. She was angry and he was angry. She was dishevelled from sleep, and he was dishevelled from his flight. She had a new roommate who didn’t want to be there, and he had a semi in his pants that he didn’t want to be there.

This was going to be terrible.

“I-,” he began. She interrupted him, holding up a tiny hand with black oil stains in the lines of her palms just like his father’s.

“No, don’t bother. I’m going back to sleep. You don’t have to be quiet, but please unpack without yelling. I left you space in the kitchen, bathroom, and closet.”

She turned on her heel with a flash of men’s plaid boxer shorts, and closed her bedroom door behind her.

Popping headphones in to drown the situation with Oscar Peterson, he set his large checked luggage on the coffee table and unzipped it. Laptop and phone set to charge, first priority, he opened the door to his bedroom.

There were sheets and bedding on the mattress, as promised, and a sniff, touch, and close visual examination determined them to be freshly washed and bedbug free.

That was something.

The entire room smelled clean, and the window had been opened to let in the June morning air. A glance back into the living room assured him that there was an air conditioning unit in the apartment for when the notorious Ontario humidity drove a 29C day to a 36C day. The thought wasn’t exciting, since he expected to be in suits regularly, meeting with his client.

It hadn’t been so extreme where he grew up in Seattle, in an admittedly nice neighbourhood. Gritty Hamilton proper, home to steel mills and factories around the harbour, he imagined would be different.

Kylo already missed the west coast.

Moving to the living space, he opened cupboards looking for the one that would be his. A Google search had found a discount grocery store nearby in easy walking range and he had nothing edible to his name.

‘No Frills’ didn’t sound promising but he wouldn’t need to cab both ways.

When he opened Rey’s pantry cupboard he had to do a double take. Absolutely every item in it was in the same plain yellow packaging, with a description of the food stuff inside in the same black helvetica as her shirt. 

‘pineapple tidbits in pineapple juice’ cans

‘macaroni & cheese in a nippy cheese sauce’ boxes 

‘cheesetastic! fromidable!’ crackers

‘hamburger harmony lasagna’ box kit

‘ripple cut ketchup chips’ and ‘cheese flavoured twists’ with a clothespin keeping them closed 

‘zoo animals & castle adventures fruit flavoured snacks’ packs

‘pure olive oil’

“What?” he said out loud, softly. “Pure as opposed to what?”

He checked the fridge.

There were plain brown bottles with the same yellow labels simply labelled “beer”, “apple beverage”, and in the door was a wine bottle labelled “white”, with their accompanying mandatory French translations.

Kylo felt like he’d fallen into a boring yellow Alice in Wonderland situation.

The produce drawer and freezer had yellow packages of fruit and veg with the additional text ‘

‘naturally imperfect’ on the bags.

Kylo made the vow there and then to never touch anything that came in the weird yellow wrapping. 

His new roommate, Rey, must have some sort of fell off the truck connection to a food service industry lowlife, getting her samples or something.

Shady.

In the entrance closet he found a hook with a canvas grocery bag of folded canvas grocery bags, all black with yellow writing. A recycling bin sat next to them, filled to the brim with carefully rinsed or flattened yellow packaging.

“For fuck’s sake, she’s obsessed,” he said, heading out to the stairs.

It was a short walk to the grocery store, he only passed two Tim Hortons, but it gave him a chance to examine the land mass behind the house. It rose up like a tree-studded wall in the west, some parts steep cliffs with rocks and a trickle of a waterfall, others a smooth sloping forest.

An elderly man out for his constitutional stopped on the sidewalk next to him, and shading his eyes in the same manner, stated where Kylo was staring.

“What’s that, son?”

“Just looking at the wall-thing. The vertical forest there.”

“The mountain?”

“That’s not a mountain,” Kylo replied flatly. He’d seen The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain enough times to know that that thing was definitely not a mountain.

The man shrugged.

“It is what it is. Hamilton mountain.”

He continued on his walk, unconcerned. The boy would learn.

Kylo pulled out his phone and searched the land mass.

The Niagara Escarpment, UNESCO protected.

“Not a mountain,” he muttered, putting his phone back and shifting the bag strap up higher on his grey henley. All the pavement made it hot, and he regretted his long sleeves and black jeans.

The store, when he spotted it across the shimmering waves of heat over the shiny black tarmac parking lot, had a suspiciously yellow sign.

“No Frills. No. Frills.”

It was Rey’s mothership. It was sea of plain yellow packages with black helvetica.

Around him carts were full of the things, people happily tossing the items with their brutally honest descriptions into carts.

“Oh come on,” he sighed, getting a basket. They carried normal products as well, and Kylo managed to acquire enough food to keep him happily in cereal for a few days at least, but he made record time getting to the check out.

“So, is this like a specialty store?” he asked the cashier. “All the yellow stuff?”

“Special how,” the young man asked, bored confusion plain as he weighed a pile of bananas. “All the No Name stuff isn’t special, everyone sells it.”

Kylo didn’t follow up. He chucked a few chocolate bars he’d never seen before on the conveyor belt, and escaped the social interaction as fast as he could.

Walking home with chocolate covered honeycomb toffee melting in his mouth, he considered his new temporary home. 

No. Name.

Wrong names.

Everything was just slightly off here.

xxx

When Kylo emerged from his room that evening, eyes blurry from reading the client’s specs in detail again before their first meeting tomorrow, he was only slightly disappointed to find Rey wearing pants.

“I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot,” he said, noticing the faint bags under her eyes. “I hope it didn’t take you long to fall back asleep.”

“It’s fine,” she dismissed, stirring a pan of ‘hamburger harmony’ on the stove. He watched her open, drain, rinse, and mix in a yellow can of lentils in place of the ground meat.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, enough edge in her voice that he knew the earlier incident was forgiven but not forgotten.

“I’ll pass,” Kylo said too quickly. Her lips tightened. He pulled out bread, jam, and peanut butter and got out of her way to make it at the little dining table.

“So what brings you to Hamilton for the summer, Ben?”

“Kylo,” he corrected.

“Sorry, your Dad said you’re Ben.”

“I am, was. My parents still call me Ben. I go by Kylo now,” he said, feeling like a mess in front of her already. Nodding at the thickening dish on the stove, Rey continued.

“And what brings you here, Kylo,” she amended.

“Work.” Of course work, idiot, he berated himself. “My work. My company builds custom enviro-forward homes, and we have a project on,” he thought a moment from the specs, “Upper Gage Road?”

“On the mountain? That’ll be a nice spot.”

“It’s not a mountain,” he said, hating himself immediately. She shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter what you call it, it is what it is.”

“I like calling things what they are. Things have names for a reason.”

“Your choice.”

“So what do you do, Rey?”

“Night manager at No Frills.”


	2. the second chapter

“You alright?” Kylo asked Rey from across the room. She was curled up like a cat in what he’d come to learn was her own reading groove in the ancient couch cushions, making a face at her book.

“Hm?” she responded absently, turning a yellowing page on the faded paperback from the library.

“You look like something in your book has personally offended you.”

She dog-eared the page and set it down on the coffee table beside her bowl of yellow-bag Dorito knock offs.

Kylo cringed, staring at he damaged corner of the book, but Rey was talking before he could offer her a bookmark. He had a perfectly acceptable one of Gandalf the Grey, tassel and everything, he wasn’t using. Or the envelope from the mail he was opening on the way to his room. Or a tissue. Or literally any object that spared that poor book from disgrace.

“I’m at the part in my book when the main character’s bee-eff-eff takes the copy of the story she’d been given to beta, changes it to include prominent product placement, and mails it away for a baking soda’s story competition.”

“She wins?” he asked, curious despite himself.

“Yeah, and then everyone celebrates it but she’s secretly horrified that everyone thinks she’s written this love song to a baking soda company. I cringe a lot, but it’s funny overall.”

“Couldn’t imagine reading a whole story about a product,” he admitted, watching her with further horror as she licked the No Name brand chip powder off her fingers. Rey wiped it her fingers dry on her jeans, standing up.

“What are you doing today?” she asked.

Kylo was surprised. After two weeks of passing like ships in the night, neither had asked such a normal, social question.

“I was going to ask to borrow your iron and ironing board to do my shirts.”

A small smile quirked the corner of Rey’s pink lips.

“Kylo, oh my sweet summer child,” she said warmly.

“What?”

“Do I have to say it?” she prompted. He stared at her. She was pretty. This was a continuing theme when he looked at her. Pretty but dishevelled.

“You don’t own an iron or ironing board,” he nodded, seeing the error in his assumption that all adults owned such equipment.

“Well, now that you’re not ironing today, I was wondering if you wanted to do a quick flight and back to Toronto? I’ve got the helicopter booked for clients through the service but they cancelled this morning, no refunds. I’m taking a couple friends for a pleasure jaunt and there’s room for one more.”

“Oh,” he stalled, processing the request. Spending the day with Rey sounded like it could be nice. Spending the day with two strangers sounded like hell. Seeing Toronto from the air sounded nice. Seeing Toronto from a helicopter being being flown by a person who dog-eared library books and licked her chip fingers sounded like hell.

“Have you been up in a small craft before?” She sensed his hesitation.

“My Dad’s four-seater, the Millennium Falcon. I got my pilot’s license when I was 16, but gave it up. Flying lost its appeal.”

“Well I promise you that we won’t crash,” she said wryly, “if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ve logged nearly a thousand flight hours on this helicopter, and I get paid to fly rich, impatient people and everything.

“That’s a lot of hours,” he acknowledged.

“I need a thousand before the provincial air ambulance service, Ornge, will even consider hiring me.”

“So you’ll go from yellow to orange? Reassuring.”

She smirked.

“Go change into brown pants, chicken. You’re coming with us. You can even ask the crew if they own irons.”

xxx

“Nope.”

“Nah.”

“No, I buy the never-irons from Mark’s.”

“Mark’s?” Kylo asked through the headset speaker to the woman in the rear seat of the chopper.

“Canadian Tire’s clothing store.”

“Your hardware stores sell women’s dress shirts?” he asked, perplexed. “Do they also sell the yellow stuff?”

“Yellow stuff?” Rose asked.

“Kylo doesn’t understand our obsession with No Name. He thinks I’m uniquely obsessed because I work there.”

“It’s weird,” he protested. “It’s weird when every product you own is in this dystopian yellow wrapped with the contents inside.”

“It’s not just her, man,” Poe assured him, clapping his shoulder in a friendly manner.“It’s just the stuff of life here. Cheap and functional.”

“But you’re all friends,” he said, getting his first view of the Great Lake from the helicopter window. 

Rey has a steady hand, and he realized that he hadn’t been thinking about the flight at all. His brain had felt safe enough to check out.

“That’s Toronto there,” Rey pointed unnecessarily at the CN Tower, which was already visible from Hamilton’s lake front on most clear days, Kylo had learned. “Be there in a few more minutes.”

“How long before we have to leave, Rey?” Finn called forward.

“Immediately, I’m only cleared to be on the launchpad ten minutes. This was a drop off only flight, then we head back. I have another set of passengers in Hamilton at eleven for a flight to Peterborough.”

“What’s in Peterborough?”

“Nothing,” Poe said darkly, thinking of his time at Trent.

On the flight back Kylo made a point of soaking in the view, absorbing the vistas and working on how that would translate into his client’s ambitious build project.

“You’ll have to take Kylo out for a longer flight sometime, Rey,” Poe recommended, breaking the silence. “He trusted you a lot faster than any of us did!”

“Didn’t even wear his brown pants,” Rey teased, checking a display. “Ballsy.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Hamilton,” he admitted. “My client wants a lot of local influences in their new structure, and I don’t know much about the place except something across the harbour is always on fire.”

“It’s part of the steel mill complex,” Rey explained.

“It’s like seeing the city’s porch light when you’re coming home at night across the Skyway bridge,” Poe said nostalgically.

“There’s got to be more to this place than steel.”

His companions shouted out a series of names that meant nothing to him, but he dutifully made a list in the notes on his phone, promising to look them up later.

The small hanger the private helicopter company owned brought back memories he tried to ignore.Rose stopped for a bathroom in the tiny office, the rest eating the communal TimBits some kind soul had left on the desk. A kettle caught his eye. Or rather, the items beside the kettle caught his eye.

Traitors.

A yellow bag labelled ‘coffee’. Nothing else, just ‘coffee’, sat next to it. Beside that yellow containers marked ‘individual sweetener packets’, ‘orange pekoe tea’, ‘hot beverage cups’, ‘wooden stir sticks’, and most bafflingly honest, ‘coffee whitener’.

Rey has infected her secondary work place with her jaundiced zeal.

“You’re really caught up in the No Name stuff, eh?” she chuckled, seeing where he was looking.

“I’m never touching anything in those yellow packs.”

“A bit late for that,” she teased. “Unless you brought your own toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and garbage bags to our apartment without telling me, you’ve used them a couple weeks.”

“I refuse to knowingly consume any of the yellow brand stuff,” he swore, amending his earlier pledge.

Rey shrugged.

“Good luck with that.”

xxx

Kylo had experience with the fact that it’s easier to bond with a group of people when there is A Thing that could be gently teased about or used as a source of conversation, and his fascination/horror with No Name had become his Thing with Rey’s friends.

At the Snooty Fox together that evening, Poe made a point of doing some light snooping.

“Kylo,” he said in a mock-whisper at the bar. “Kylo, look.”

While the bartender moved to a customer at the far end of the sticky bar top, Poe leaned over it and waved Kylo to do the same.

Yellow packages of cleaning supplies, juices, even cans of tonic were tucked into the dark cubbies, hidden away.

“It could just be a crappy pub,” Kylo shrugged, taking his Irish cider (he’d ignored the dozen local offerings) and heading back to his shepherds pie and the others.

Rey, he discovered, was well in on the teasing.

She had agreed to spend a very rare day off with him, showing him her favourite parts of town.

No one had brought up the word date, but Kylo had no objection to the idea in principle. Living with Rey was living with a ghost most of the time. She slept and worked and was terribly attractive the few moments they crossed paths. Her smile was beginning to haunt him, as were the long legs she bared with abandon.

“Dundurn Castle,” she announced, the grand home coming into full view around from the parking lot.

“That’s not a castle,” Kylo said automatically. He’d been to real castles with his parents on holidays, places like Ireland and Scotland, and this, this was merely a big house on some big cliffs over a lake.

“It was to the folks who lived around here at its heyday,” Rey shrugged.

“There is no overlap between this house and an actual castle. It’s the mountain-escarpment thing all over again.”

“You can have more fun with words, you know Kylo,” Rey recommended, flashing a reciprocal pass card to the entrance cashier while Kylo pulled out the strangely multicoloured plastic bills he’d grown fond of shortly after arrival when he’d run a bunch through the washer with no ill effects.

“I value accuracy. It’s important.”

They strode down the wooden walkway towards the kitchens, nodding to chipper tourism staff sweating in their period woolens.

“Living in the grey isn’t so bad,” Rey said, pointing into the slightly ajar closet there the staff kept their modern cleaning gear, all No Name bulk packs. Kylo tolled his eyes. “Besides, with this obsession over accuracy, and calling something it’s proper names aren’t you in fact living under an alias.”

Kylo stopped, grateful for the kitchen tour guide’s speech to give him time to think. They nibbled freshly baked herb scones, and watched a demonstration of sugar being scraped off the cone.

“Maybe it comes down to the intention to deceive,” he decided finally, moving into the servants dining room. He’d have been quite happy to pull a chair up to the stove in the cosy room and spend the evening there with a book himself. “The escarpment is not a mountain. This house is not a castle. I am not Ben Solo. To say otherwise in the here and now would be a deception I will not practice.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with you using an alias,” Rey said, both that he wasn’t upset but looked a bit strained by the mental gymnastics. “Do you even know my last name?”

“Of course I...” It must have been on the rental agreement. No, that had been the landlord’s. Had she mentioned it in any messages? Had her friends? Her name tag when he’d visited her at work, bored in the middle of the night? “Don’t,” he finished.

“I don’t know my legal last name,” Rey stated baldly, now looking up at the grand staircase in the entrance hall. “I was abandoned at Disney World in Florida by my English parents. The next few years I was with a man, Plutt, who worked me hard in his scrap yard with a bunch of other kids without proper names. I wasn’t in the American system at all, they didn’t know I existed, and I was too young to remember having a last name. So I just didn’t.”

Kylo had stopped walking, a hand wrapped around the newel.

“That’s a hell of a childhood,” he stumbled out, aghast. “And you didn’t just... pick one?”

Rey smiled at the lack of filter in his facial features. She had truly horrified him.

“No, it felt inauthentic at this point, making up a name when I have no name.”

“How are you not a serial killer or something?”

“Lots of therapy?”

“How did you get here?”

“Smuggled myself into a transport truck, made it across the border, marched myself into a police station and told them everything. I was in my teens.”

“Jesus Christ, Rey,” Kylo said, not even pretending to read the interpretive sign on McNab’s daughter’s wedding. “I feel like I should hug you or something. I don’t even know. Or like I should give you a huge amount of personal space. Whatever you want.”

“I like hugs but you don’t seem like the huggy sor-“

Bear-sized arms wrapped around her, pulling her against a solid wall of a chest. Kylo tucked her head under his chin, just feeling her breathe. 

“I barely know you but I’m so happy that you’re safe and have a life,” he said quietly, closing his eyes.

“You are a surprisingly soft man, for a man surprisingly made of rock,” Rey teased gently, appreciating the physical gesture even if it had been quite sudden. “Are we becoming friends? Is this you becoming emotionally invested in me?”

Kylo released her, stepping an extra pace back to give them room to assess.

“Do we need to put a name to it?”


	3. the third chapter

“Hey,” Kylo said, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

The storm had woken him, his bladder forcing him out of the snug bed. It wasn’t until his less urgent return trip that he noticed the figure in doorway to the fire escape.

Rey had moved one of their kitchen chairs to the brink of being rained on, propping the door open, most of her body sheltered by the roof overhang. Her feet were soaked, propped up on the rail, streams of water running down her bare legs towards her T-shirt and underpants. In the struggling dawn light he could see the silhouette of a beer bottle beside her, a cooking pot on her lap with a fork sticking out.

“Home from work early?” he asked, making out the clock on the stove.

“Mm-hm,” she answered, “Store closed for a leak. Clean up on aisle three starting with the roof itself. Want some?” She held the pot out to him.

Too dozy to think hard, Kylo took it and stood over her, watching the storm while he ate her dinner.

“This is nice,” she said, “I hope it clears so I can fly tomorrow, but it’s nice now.”

“What am I eating?” he finally asked, spearing something cylindrical.

“Kraft dinner and cut up hot dogs,” Rey said. “Some ketchup.”

“Any of it...?”

“No, weirdo,” she laughed, looking directly up at him but just getting a view of the bottom of the pot and his pectorals. “None of it is No Name.”

“If you’re lying to me, don’t tell me, I’m too tired for vendettas,” he said, carefully lowering the pot down to her lap for her, and scooping up her beer on the way back up.

“When you go back to Seattle, who will I tease?” Rey asked, plucking the beer back out of his hands. She’d shredded the label, the pieces likely blown away by the wind.

“I think you’ll probably live without my frustrating presence in your home,” he laughed. 

“There have been frustrating moments,” she agreed softly, rubbing her ankle against her leg to dislodge a small leaf. The rain running down her legs was mesmerizing.

“I don’t need to be up for hours,” he said, clearing his throat awkwardly. “I’m going to head back to bed. You should probably think about coming in, you must be soaked.”

“I am,” she murmured. “I’ll need to strip down as soon as I come in.”

“Yeah. Um, okay. Yeah. I’ll head back now.” His whole body felt far too large and clumsy.

“Know the way?” she asked, with what Kylo assumed he was grossly mishearing as a suggestive tone.

“Okay, yeah, no, for sure, I’m fine. I know.” There was no way his hot roommate was flirting with him in the dark in a storm in the dawn light. The aftertaste of chemical orange cheese told him he wasn’t dreaming, but he must be half asleep.

“Okay, goodnight Kylo. Let me know if the storm keeps you up and you need some company.” Rey shot him a smile he didn’t understand. “Looks like I’ll just have a solo session out here if I can’t have a Solo session in there.”

Am I the Solo in this, Kylo thought as he pulled the covers up to his chin in his solitary bed. He was pretty sure she meant a joke about his old name.

Wait.

Rey was flirting. 

Rey was definitely flirting.

“God, Kylo, you really ballsed that one up,” he whispered. Maybe he’d have another opportunity with Rey this summer, he thought, rolling up in his blankets to go back to sleep.

What did solo session even mean.

The next afternoon when Rey shambled out of her bedroom (in a different T-shirt and underpants than he’d seen the earlier) Kylo wondered if she’d be uncomfortable about her potentially rejected potential advances, but she seemed her usual self.

“Am I in your way?” he asked, finishing up his dishes while she tried to fill the kettle for coffee.

“Little,” she admitted, holding up the yellow vat of instant that she found acceptable. “But don’t worry, if I need to banish you I’ll just hold this up like a cross to a vampire.” She pressed the plastic container into his abs. “Begone, brand snob, begone!”

Rolling his eyes, Kylo hissed and backed away to play along, snatching up the hand towel to dry his hands. Not the tea towel Rey has just used to dry her hands. Not that that bothered him. At all.

“I noticed a photo on your wall when you left your door open the other day, hope you don’t mind I took a peek,” he said, bucking up his courage to start a normal conversation. “Where was it taken?”

A shadow crossed her face and he immediately tried to backtrack.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have looked in your room, that crossed a-“

“No, I don’t care if you’re in my room, Kylo, you can read my diary for all I care, but the photo is of a place that was very dear to me that no longer exists,” she said calmly, her cheeks flushing with anger.

“Oh dear,” he said, reaching so hard back for something appropriate to say that he found his mother’s vocabulary.

“It’s a highway now.”

“But it was beautiful.”

“Yeah, it was also full of indigenous burials and sacred spaces, endangered species, a lot of legal and ethical reasons why they should have stayed the fuck away from it. But you know, it shaved six minutes off the commute between Hamilton and Stoney Creek, so clearly that was priority.”

“Is there anything left?”

Rey sighed, pouring hot water from the kettle into her mug.

“Yeah, some. But it just stops. Like you’re in the ancient forest on a trail and you come through the trees and it’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland of concrete and cars.”

“Can you show me? The red soil looked cool.”

“Yeah, I’ll take you, Kylo,” she said, watching the motion of her spoon. “But can we go somewhere else after as a palate cleanser? Some place that hasn’t been ruined?”

“Please,” he agreed, eager for the opportunity to spend more time with her.

“You know what the sickest part is now?” she asked rhetorically. “That it’s named the Red Hill Valley Expressway, like they didn’t destroy the Red Hill Valley to build it. The name doesn’t change what it is.”

“Like if I still called myself Ben Solo after destroying him?” he asked absently, checking his calendar on his phone to propose a date.

Rey frowned.

“I’ve never teased you about that or objected to it,” she said defensively, “you can call yourself anything you damn well please.”

Kylo looked up, startled.

“I never said you did. I figured you understood it the same way you never took on a fake last name you didn’t identify with.”

“Right,” she said, staring at him, a little confused.

“Right,” he agreed, nodding. “We’re on the same page on this. I object to fake names being applied inappropriately to objects they don’t accurately represent, but people choose what represents them and what they choose is correct.”

“Are we doing this again?” she said. “Sometimes the names, or lack of names, of objects represents a spirit more than a fact.”

He shrugged, holding out his phone, calendar ready.

“Put in the date that works for you, I’ll work around it.”

Thinking a moment, Rey popped in their hiking trip and gave him back his phone.

“Date with Rey to angry place/happy place,” was the text she’d applied to an afternoon the next week.

“Date?”

“Don’t get excited,” she said wryly. “It doesn’t have to be a date date. Or we don’t have to call it anything.”

“Oh.”

She sipped at her coffee, looking a little embarrassed.

“Did you think I was drunk this morning?”

“No,” he said, perplexed. He tucked his phone back in his jeans pocket, leaning against the peninsula of the counter that separated kitchen from living room.

“Because I wasn’t, you know. I’d only had half a beer, I was still fully with it.”

“Okay,” he said slowly.

“Okay.” She stared blankly at him a moment. “Okay well that’s that then.”

“Okay,” he repeated, watching her take her coffee into her bedroom and close the door. “What’s what then,” he asked himself, scratching his chest through his T-shirt. 

xxx

“How intense is this hike?” Kylo asked a week later, lacing up his Docs. “What do I need to bring?”

Rey shifted the plain but sturdy canvas backpack over her shoulder, but let her eyes trail down the red plaid shirt he’d just finished buttoning as if her attention was divided.

“I’ve got everything we need. You just bring you.”

“Fair enough.”

xxx

“Damn,” Kylo said, rubbing at the back of his hair where the sweat made it heavy against his neck. He shifted the Blue Jays baseball cap Rey had passed along from a passenger on a flight the week earlier. She wouldn’t name him, but Kylo could guess his associations since there was a scrawled Sharpie message “To Rey the hot pilot” inside with a phone number. Made him feel good that the advances were so unwelcome he wore the hat instead of her.

Most of those pleasant emotions, the sunny day, Rey’s amusing and most welcome company, the forest, had vanished sharply.

Much like the ground below him.

“You’re right, it’s just... stops.”

Rey kicked a clump of small rocks over the edge of the carved out cliff face, a busy highway below them.

“Jesus murphy, it’s worse than I remembered. Let’s go back,” she said moodily.

“Hold on, I want to take a couple photos,” he said, digging out his phone.

“Give’r. I don’t want to be here,” she said, “I’ll meet you back at the last curve of the trail.”

“So where are we going next?” he asked, jogging to catch up to Rey. She wore a white tank with a Canada flag, and denim shorts, and while he admired the view from behind he wanted to talk to her more.

“To the Devil’s Punchbowl,” she said fiercely.

“Devil’s... punch...” God I hope that’s just a name, Kylo thought wryly.

After a bit of a drive they parked on a tiny street on a hill marked ‘Old Mountain Road’, with a scatter of houses and a set of metal trail stairs. They climbed in silence in the hot sun, the metal burning under their palms when they forgot and grinned the handrails. 

“So far this sucks,” Kylo called back to Rey, who had elected to go behind him for their initial ascent.

“It’ll get better,” she assured.

“When does Satan get involved?”

“At the end!”

“Does this trip include you sacrificing me to your Canadian gods?”

“Bylaw states all hoser-sacrifices must take place in hockey rinks to the sound of Anne Murray or Rita McNeil.”

“That’s a relief. Have I earned a poutine yet?”

“There’s a picnic in my backpack,” she said, surprising him.

Peeled up by the idea of food, Kylo stormed up the rest of the steps and found a raspberry covered chain link fence and gate next to a set of train tracks.

Rey pulled an empty, clean plastic container, the kind Kylo would have probably recycled instead of saved, and began picking berries.

“Uhhhh...” he said, watching her pop a few in her mouth and she filled. “Isn’t this not allowed? Or stealing? Or aren’t they sprayed or something?”

She gave him a pitying smirk.

“Think CN or the crown spend much time picking berries along this fence? It’s fine, Kylo. Get some before the birds do.”

Her confidence fed his, and he pulled a ripe raspberry from the prickly bush. Examining it closely for unwelcome flora or fauna, he eventually ate it. Rey watched the plumb berry disappear past his lips, watched him savour the tart-sweet flavour.

“Good?”

“Good,” he said, helping her fill the container. She replaced it into the backpack, and took him across the tracks to a trailhead. A few minutes of cool forest darkness and they reached a fork.

“We’ll do the little falls first,” she instructed, taking him on the left-hand trail, narrow and falling off steeply into a creek bed.

She took him to a small waterfall where they sat and had some water from their bottles, then she marched him along the upper side of the rocky creek bed. 

The trees parted and Kylo gave a low whistle.

Rising up in front of him was a thin ribbon of a waterfall, plunging down from a geographical marvel. Colourful layers of rock and soil, reds, blues, golden yellows, made up the curving wall in front of him. The erosion had created a rounded bowl, slicing through the escarpment.

“The big falls!” Rey announced, throwing her arms wide when she reached the water like she was greeting an old friend.

“I don’t see the devil,” Kylo teased, taking her hand as he tilted his ave up to catch the spray from the bottom of the falls.

“Devil’s at the top,” she said, casually threading her fingers through his so he knew he was welcome.

It was tricky going, trying to hold hands on the trails, but once they’d reached the fork close to the tracks and started up the old road trail, it was wide enough for two to walk abreast, of a big steep in places.

“Can you imagine a horse and buggy on this road?” Rey said, fleet-footed over roots and stones and shale slides like a sprite. Kylo’s mass slowed him down, lifting a heavier burden up the trail, but Rey seemed content to match her pace to his.

They made it to the top, and Rey led him along a quiet paved road to the lookout point. A massive metal cross with electric lightbulbs sat on a concrete base.

“That’s a bit...”

“Weird, yeah,” Rey agreed. “A guy put it up and the city is just... used to it. Think the city even provides the hydro for free, it’s just A Thing now. The even filmed part of Silent Hill here.”

“Huh,” Kylo nodded. “Okay then.”

Rey took him past the cross to the edge of the lookout.

“Jesus murphy,” he murmured, taking a note from her vocabulary. “I can see everything from here. The city, the lake, Toronto. People must have really thought this was a mountain.”

“Yup,” Rey agreed, dropping her backpack to arrange her supplies. She spread out a blanket that looked like a polar fleece Canada flag right at the edge, and laid out a large Nalgene that smelled suspiciously of wine, pb&js, apples, the raspberries, and a couple strange chocolate bars.

“Lunch is served,” she said proudly, laughing at her own presentation.

They shared her packed  dinner, looking out over the city.

“This place is beautiful,” Kylo said. “Sitting here, I’d believe an escarpment could be a mountain, and a big house could be a castle, and you could eat weird yellow food and not die.”

“Good, because you’ve eaten a lot of it already,” Rey admitted, settling her head on his shoulder. Kylo wrapped an arm around her.

“I know,” he said. “It was worth it.”

Kylo tilted his face towards Rey’s, his intention clear. She smiled, and met him halfway. Their lips touched gently, soft in the golden light of the late afternoon. 

“Kylo,” she breathed, kissing him again. He felt Rey’s hand slide up his neck to cup his cheek.

“You know you can call me whatever you want,” he whispered.

“What about mine?” she answered, 

“Seems the most accurate name,” he agreed, pulling her on to his lap.

”You’ll be happy to know that No Name does not, in fact, make condoms,” she teased.


End file.
